The Old Silent

by Martha Grimes

  2

  In the Old Silent there was a better-than-average lunch-time crowd in the dining room. Jury walked through the lounge and saloon bar and asked the proprietor for a pint of Abbott's, a cheese sandwich, and the use of the telephone.

  Sitting near the fire were a young man and woman with a distinctly newlywed look about them paying no attention to Jury.

  Jury was halfway through his drink, thinking again about that argument between Macalvie and Gilly Thwaite in the forensics lab. His call to Bradford station having gone through the hands and ears of three policemen, before Chief Superintendent Sanderson decided to pick up. "What is it, Superintendent?" Sanderson asked edgily, making it clear he didn't want to know the answer.

  The young waitress put Jury's sandwich before him-a slab of cheddar between slices of richly grained bread, the platter nicely done up with cress and tomato. He thanked her.

  "For what?" asked Sanderson.

  "Nothing. The waitress. I'm at the Old Silent having a sandwich."

  "Unfortunately I haven't time for lunch. We could sit here and have a meal together. Why're you calling, Mr. Jury?"

  "About the telephone kiosk along the Oakworth Road. About a mile from the Grouse-"

  Roughly, Sanderson cut in. "I know where it is. And so do my forensics people. Next question?"

  Jury smiled as he bit into the end of the sandwich. Very good, but he wasn't really hungry. Sanderson certainly didn't dawdle along with preliminaries. "None. I wanted to apologize."

  The silence meant that he'd caught the superintendent slightly off-guard, as Jury hoped he would: not that an "apology" meant a damned thing; it was that Sanderson was gearing up to stomp on Jury's next words. Now, of course, he had to refute the apology. Jury pushed the cress off the sandwich and took another mouthful that he didn't want.

  "Mr. Jury, your apology is noted and means sod-all to me and my department. You happen to witness a crime in a jurisdiction you've nothing at all to do with and you persist in investigating same. All of this has, as I'm sure you know by now, been reported to your superiors. You've been getting in our way-"

  Not mucking about in our manor. Jury wouldn't mind working for Sanderson.

  "-so if I were you, I'd stop chewing in my ear."

  Again, Jury smiled. "I was wondering." Jury took a drink of his beer.

  Another brief silence. "Wondering what?"

  "About that call box-"

  Sanderson must have been leaning back in his chair, for the sudden thump sounded like something hitting the floor. He was probably furious with himself for having forgotten the original thread of this conversation. "Listen to me: you know goddamned well that we're not rubes and that we don't need London to tell us how to lift fingerprints. That kiosk was gone over so thoroughly it'll probably need a paint job. We are routinely putting a trace on any prints we found." He lowered his voice. "But I doubt very much that a killer would forget to wipe the receiver, the door handle, the entire damned thingif he wanted to."

  "Except the coins. No way to get to the coins you've slotted into the box. As long as Telecom doesn't go at it with an axe."

  Sanderson was silent.

  They hadn't done it; Jury knew it would click into place in Sanderson's mind much faster than it had in Gilly Thwaite's. It would probably be one or more of the coins lying on top. The calls had been made only within the last thirty-six hours.

  Jury thought he'd give him breathing time by becoming obnoxious. "I'm not stupid, Chief Superintendent. I know that the last time you asked for help was with the Ripper case. That man is brilliant; Yorkshire police made things so difficult for him he threw up his arms and went back to London." Jury was depending on Sanderson's being the professional that Racer wasn't. He'd know what Jury was saying.

  He did. "The only prints we have are Nell Healey's, the ones taken when she was charged."

  "There's a brandy decanter that was getting some heavy use at the Citrine house. I'm sure you could find some reason to take something from that house. As for prints, I have some others. A package will be delivered to headquarters this afternoon. Do you want the details?"

  "Hell, no." The line went dead.

  Jury drank off the dregs of his beer, as he dialed the Holts' number. Fortunately, it was Owen who answered. Yes, he supposed he could meet the superintendent at the inn if it was important.

  Jury rang off and sat regarding the largely uneaten sandwich and felt Sergeant Wiggins was looking over his shoulder-have to keep your strength up, sir. He stared down at the table, wondering what it was he had missed. Some detail, some small detail seemed to have lodged beneath his consciousness like a figure under thick ice, the contours of which one couldn't make out. He went back over the conversation with Sanderson, tried to chip away at it. Nothing would surface. He sighed and picked up the sandwich and ate it as he looked at the notes Plant had made in his straight-up-and-down, rather elegant hand.

  The Princess was a "possible" (Poss.). She might have been in her room since tea with one of her "sick headaches" (as she had said), but the ermine-lined boots had been missing when Plant had walked through the hall. George Poges: verified dinner O.S.I, but after? Poss. Ramona Braine: TL to bed early. Snores. And Malcolm, well, highly unlikely, although he had the temperament for it. By his name was an X. Impossible. Same for Mrs. Braithwaite and Ruby, both ot whom were either in their rooms or the kitchen. But Jury had to grin at the way the handwriting changed when it came to Ellen Taylor. One could actually feel the grudging tone in the hand that had grown stiffer, tighter, almost at the end shriveling into indecipherability. It must have killed Plant to strike out the Xand pen in Poss. (since Ellen hadn't shown up at Weavers Hall until long after Abby appeared to have left). But Plant could not resist the editorializing: Absolutely ridiculous!

  Jury sat for a few moments thinking of Dench and Macalvie. He dialed the Exeter number.

  He picked up on the first ring, interrupted the first ring. "Macalvie here."

  It was amazing. Macalvie managed to be both out and in simultaneously; Jury knew he seldom hung round his office, yet he always managed to be at the telephone. He seemed to have doubled himself in some magical way.

  Before Jury could say anything but his name, the receiver was moved and the commander was yelling at someone. Since Jury could hear a sharp voice return the thrust, it must have been Gilly Thwaite.

  "She's got scissors for a mouth. Yeah, Jury what?"

  "She's probably the best person you have. You'll push her so far she'll put in for a transfer."

  A sound between a gargle and a laugh came over the wire. "Are you kidding?"

  It sounded much like Melrose Plant's Absolutely ridiculous! Jury smiled, and said straightaway, "You're making no allowance at all that Dennis Dench is right?"

  "No. He's wrong."

  Jury heard a slight creak and a small thud: Macalvie leaning back and planting his feet on the desk. Jury could see him there, probably sitting in his coat. "You ever heard of W. B. Yeats?" Macalvie asked. Before Jury could answer, Macalvie put him on Hold to deal with another call.

  Macalvie was an omnivorous reader, a habit picked up from standing by bookshelves in suspects' homes. It had paid off several times, once in particular when he'd come across one of Polly Praed's mysteries, among the tooled-leather volumes of a Greek scholar who was suspected of having coshed a fellow-academic with an easing knife, but who had claimed not even to know what an easing knife was. Polly's book was titled Murder in the Thatched Barn. While his D.I. questioned the professor, who'd done masterful translations of Pliny the Younger, Macalvie speed-read the first half of the book. He later informed Melrose Plant that his lady mystery-writing friend didn't have exactly the wings of Pegasus, indeed must have been writing with horse's hooves, so turgid was the plot and so asinine the policework. But he was now a rabid fan, since she'd helped him out, all unknowingly.

  "Dear Miss Praed: The rifle you claim to have killed Doris Quick (p. 134) in Sussex would have blown her all
the way to Cornwall, fired from that angle. Enclosed, please find…"

  Stuff like that. And Polly shot a letter, like the bullet, right back.

  Jury wondered, while Macalvie was giving "instructions" to some poor forensics clod probably also wed to the God of Inaccuracy, how the Praed-Macalvie correspondence was going. It was certain, given Polly's books, she didn't read the material the commander helpfully sent her.

  Thus Jury smoked his cigarette and wondered how Yeats had got into all of this.

  " 'A terrible beauty is born,'" said Macalvie. "That Yeats."

  "Macalvie, there's only one W. B. Yeats."

  "True. And what do you know about his bones?"

  Jury frowned. Bones? A line swam into his mind. " 'The old rag and bone shop of the heart'?"

  "The rag and bone shop is where I work, Jury. No-"

  Jury could hear drawers opening and slamming and then a paper rattling. "I kept this; I tossed it in Dench's face. Now we're talking about W. B. Yeats, remember? So you can imagine how those bones would have been gone over to prove they were his."

  "Yeats was buried in County Sligo."

  "France. In a temporary grave before they could get the bones back to Ireland. Someone comes along and says the bones were tossed into a huge paupers' grave and no one really knew if the remains were the poet's. Naturally, the family went nuts. Who can blame them? My point is: the expert said that after all that time it would be impossible to prove they were or weren't W. B. Yeats's bones."

  "Meaning Dennis Dench could be wrong."

  "He is wrong. Too many coincidences, too many. The time frame, the burial place, the dog-the little dog, Jury- the remnants of metal, et cetera, et cetera-"

  "Speaking of poetry, Macalvie: when we were at the house in Cornwall I found a little paperback book in Billy's room. American poetry-Frost, Whitman, Dickinson, et cetera. Emily Dickinson is one of Nell Healey's favorite poets. It was a copy of the same book she had in her pocket when I was talking to her. She sent her copy to Abby Cable, little girl at Weavers Hall. Nell Healey's very fond of poetry; she used to read it to Billy and Toby, especially Frost and Dickinson."

  "What's all this in aid of?"

  "Several poems in this paperback are heavily scored or X'd. One in particular is interesting:

  It was not death for I stood up

  and all the dead lay down-"

  "Sounds like headquarters-"

  "Listen, Macalvie:

  It was not frost, for on my skin

  I felt siroccos crawl."

  Jury stopped and there was a brief silence on Macalvie's end.

  "In the margin there's a little notation, 'a desert wind, hot.' " Jury paused. "You know a band called Sirocco?"

  "Yes…"

  "Have you read the latest London Weekend or Time Out?"

  "I'm fully booked. I have an opening to attend in the Haymarket, front-row tickets for Derek Jacobi. Then there's Wembley Arena and Jimmy Page. And I always catch Michael Jackson. Hell no, I haven't read them."

  "The name of the band used to be Bad News Coming. Then they changed it; Alvaro Jiminez said they wanted a new identity, or something. Sirocco was Charlie's idea. It was also Charlie's idea to change the tour date for the Odeon. Sirocco was supposed to do a concert in Munich first. Do you know how hard that is? To rearrange tour dates? The manager went through hell."

  "Why'd they change it? Not that any of this means sod-all because I know where you're headed and you're wrong."

  "No, you don't know where I'm headed, Macalvie. I'll get to that in a minute. Do you know their tunes? Or do you only listen to Elvis?"

  "I've heard a few of their cuts. Weren't we playing one on the way to Cornwall?"

  " 'Yesterday's Rain.'"

  "Don't sing to me. The poetry was enough."

  "The words wouldn't mean anything to you unless you'd seen a Magritte painting called 'Empire of Light.' There's a print hanging in-never mind, only that it was one of Nell Healey's favorite paintings. The words to that song are extremely resonant of both Cornwall and that painting."

  Macalvie sighed. "At least Denny has a few bones to fool with."

  "I talked to Charlie Raine. I went to the Odeon, took him to a pub for some lunch. He knew about the Healey case-"

  "As does half the country."

  "The kid's been out of England, Macalvie. With all he's got to do, why would he be so taken up with this case? He knew every detail. More than that, he thought I'd come to the Odeon because I knew who he was. He got the concert date changed because he wanted to be here."

  "Um-hmm."

  "Meaning?"

  "We're back to the Unknown Kid, the third-party solution, or… oh, let me guess. Next you're going to tell me the skeleton in that grave was-"

  "Toby Holt."

  Macalvie's silence was so total that Jury could hear, from across the room, the black cat's twitchy little snores coming from the sedan chair.

  "Toby Holt. Brilliant. Aren't you forgetting one crucial piece of evidence? Toby Holt was run down by a lorry five weeks later. Owen Holt identified the body."

  "Who said he was telling the truth?"

  "Why in hell wouldn't he?"

  "Ten thousand pounds. A trust fund set up for Toby's schooling by Nell Healey. You didn't know about it; you were taken off the case." Jury told him what the Holts had said. "You know how the odds go down every day, every hour a kid is missing that he'll ever be found. It's not that coldblooded-"

  "Just a tad illegal, for Christ's sakes. And how do you know this?"

  "I don't, yet. But I think I will after I talk to Owen Holt."

  Jury heard a drawer open, slam shut. Macalvie was getting out the paper cups. "It wasn't your case, Macalvie."

  "Obviously. It never got solved."

  "The lead guitarist, Charlie Raine." Jury paused. "I think he's Billy Healey."

  In that cat-pad, quiet voice Macalvie used when he was really disturbed, he said, "Jury. Billy Healey is dead."

  "I was afraid you'd say that. Listen-"

  "No. I'd rather talk to Denny. At least he serves wine."

  "Listen: say I'm crazy-"

  "No problem."

  "Security at those concerts is nil. It's only laid on to keep the peace. The loudmouths, the beer-guzzlers, the snorters, the ardent fans. Wiggins has rounded up a few men who aren't on rota."

  "Are you telling me you think someone's going to try to off your boy in the middle of a concert with-hell, you've seen too many Hitchcock films."

  Jury was getting impatient, but still kept his voice low. "Come on, Brian, goddammit, I'm not talking about the London Symphony or the Royal Albert Hall. This is the Hammersmith Odeon, and these aren't people who toss on their gowns and tails to make sure they're seen. These are fans. These are people who don't eye the box seats to see if there's someone they've missed who's wearing a coronet. These are fans who plunk down ten pounds to see some of the greatest musicians in the world and they listen-"

  "You should be reviewing for Juke Blues. Okay, okay, I get the point. There's so much noise you couldn't even hear Gilly if she was standing next to you. So you want reinforcements. Yeah, so go ahead. What time tonight?"

  "Eight."

  "Wonderful. That's all of six hours to round up whoever's stupid enough to buy this act and get them there. Great. Except it isn't Billy Healey, Jury."

  "So what've we lost?"

  "Probably our jobs. Not that that means anything."

  Jury could almost hear the grin. "Thanks. I'm sending photos of six people on the wire. One in London, five here. One in particular. There's a mass exodus to London from West Yorkshire."

  The silence lengthened until Jury wondered if Macalvie had rung off.

  "And did you tell Nell Healey that you think her son's alive? That he turned out to be famous, which is what that bastard of a husband always wanted?"

  Jury didn't answer.

  "Billy Healey was a pianist, Jury, not a guitarist."

  For Macalvie, that
was pretty weak. "He could play anything put in his hands, according to several people. And I imagine Charlie plays keyboard, though he said 'not much.'"

  "Like your theory. Psychologically it's lousy, Jury. Here's a kid who doesn't get in touch with his much-beloved stepmother for eight years."

  "If someone tried to bury you alive, I imagine you wouldn't be too eager to take a chance on being found."

  "So Billy Healey somehow becomes a hot, young guitarist in New York. Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous." The phone slammed down.

  Jury sat there with the dead receiver knowing Macalvie had serious doubts about his own theory and thinking of Plant's list.

  Absolutely ridiculous.

  Jury replaced the receiver and thought of Plant's hot, young, New York writer.

  Poss.

  3

  Far from giving the impression of a man who frequented pubs, Owen Holt stood just inside the door of the Old Silent, turning his cap in his hands and looking round him as if he'd wandered onto some foreign shore where he didn't speak the language. His slight smile when he saw Jury was uncertain, his expression baffled.

  Jury led him to a chair in the lounge bar, saying, "Thanks for coming so quickly." The man merely nodded and waited. "Sit down; let me get you a drink."

  "Half pint of Guinness'll do for me. Helps me sleep."

  Jury watched Owen Holt as he waited for the drinks. He was studying the room and its unfamiliar furnishings, looking about naively as if he seldom left his front parlor. For some reason, Holt put Jury in mind of a stodgy fairy-tale figure: the trusty woodsman, perhaps, or one of the kind but utterly unimaginative couple who had taken in some waif. Weren't children in fairy tales so often disenfranchised?

  As he set down the drinks, Jury said, "I hope your wife wasn't too annoyed by my dragging you away."

  "Dihn't tell her, did I? Just said I was going along to the Black Bush to see one of my mates." He took a long, slow drink, wiped his hand across his mouth and leaned forward. "I expect this is about the money."